Take away from - Mobile Apps Conclave 2011

Cellstrat was hosting the event which is a Market research, social media and digital company.

Pratapa, Vodafone Keynote:WAC was supposed to be big, we are making mistakes as we don’t think of users: but technology.
Apple gives WOW UX and Google’s interconnect and integrated help communication, all focused towards customers.
Don't sell technology sell experience to users.Users have no issues with privacy but it's about the control they have on their information.Life was simple when apple and blackberry were just fruits
Don't over engineering mobile app or try replacing it with traditional web app.
80% of Internet access in India will be from mobile in 2015
Future: Mobile Cloud computing + Mobile Web apps
eg: Mirror app is something which fits into our lifestyle

Panel- Mobile App go mainstream:App Market needs financial success.
Aircel is making money, but not developer’s
Developers face problem in reaching out to their consumers.
Consumer devices like mobile are very sensitive to UX
Questions like:- visibility of app
- marketing of app
- Indian vendors quote in dollars
- which platform should developers focus
- is mobile web a gr8 platform
- how to monitories the app -> premium, sponsorship, advertisement
- M-commerce future ?Service guys must wear content hat.
Focus on consumer and scale
User experience is primary, be creative and think how to market app from the day one
Mobile apps Indian startups are growing multinational. Lots of opportunities around and it’s worth taking a risk now.

Discussions around HTML5:- Native is going to go far ahead with the market competition thus web not being standardized will take some time to catch-up
- Key is to find the right hybrid.
- HTML5 is going to be the only choice of the developers, but the question is “when”
- Market forces will solve the problem of HTML5. It’s a gr8 platform which can't be ignored

Sridhar, inMobi “Mobile Apps and Web”:Due to market pressure we are forced to push our boundaries of creativity.

250M mobile Internet users from India

Unlearn the PC world to work in mobile space
Mobile Advertisements are great marketing tools
Mobile Advt are like mini app, going beyond text and banners
Mobile is not just a extension of PC web
Asians like advt in mobiles
Its marketer’s choice: web app advt or in-app advt

Sunny, Nuance: “Emerging Mobile Ecosystem”Cars are connected to whole lot of devices and is a big phone.
Connectivity is important let our kids not learn the word “buffering”
Collaboration of Telco + developer is needed
One time password regulation is a pain.
Amazon is pleased with the mobile payment revenue
Voice based social networking integration is futureIn all it was a great conference witnessing many entrepreneurs, visionaries and market researchers predicting the future of Mobile apps. Unfortunately the event did not touch upon the theme “The Mobile Web disruption”. Mobile future in undoubtedly great but it time to bring more innovation in the field of Mobile Web, mCommerce, accessibility for disabled people, enterprise.

Mobile has a long way to make this world - Paperless and PC less.

Talk at MSRIT on Android being Open Source

I was invited by VRGLINUG the GNU/Linux Users from M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology (MSRIT). Annually, Mukthi a premier, student focused, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)event. It serves as a forum for promoting FOSS among the student community, and spreading an awareness of how FOSS can be a good alternative to proprietary software.

Mukthi 11.04 was hosted on April 23rd and 24th 2011, featured a host of talks by FOSS luminaries.
My talk was about: “Android is open, but let’s do it right”.
- Android overview
- Why Android?
- Open platform and Open source
- Android is Open, what does it mean for a developer ?
- Abiding to OSS policies

Some interesting questions I faced from the OSS enthusiast students:
- Why is honeycomb not open sourced by google ?
- How should we get over the fragmentation issues ?
- Can we integrate QT on android ?
- Can we program C/C++ on android ?
- Why new version builds on devices like Motorola etc take time ?

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Android is Open, so lets do it right

View more presentations from Bhavya Siddappa.

Some interesting comments from the audience:
“Android is not truly OSS”
“Android innovation speed is amazing”
“It would be great to see less prices android phones coming soon in the market”
There were some interesting talks by well recognized experts from the FOSS world, as well as professionals from the software industry. It was very well received by all.
I had fun interacting with the knowledgeable audience. One more memorable event for me :)

The message is very clear "OSS will never die and all thanks to the great community support and believers "

Windows Mobile 7 Meetup hosted by Mobile Monday Bangalore

Few notes from the meetup: -
- The next big thing is Mobile and Cloud Computing.
- WP7 UI design is inspired by US Metro design.
- WP7 wants consistent platform experience to users across devices
- Cloud enabled push notifications
- End user customization
- Development Tools: Visual Studio 2010, Sliverlight, XNA, Blend 4 for app designing
- Currently 12 k apps in WP7 store
- Has a sandbox framework and no IPC communication
- WP7 learned mistakes from other platforms and trying to fill in those gaps
- No internal DB support, use isolated storage data on phone or place it on cloud
- 3 Philosophy : Apps running on Xbox, Desktop & mobiles all stored on cloud
- Users can enable only 15 notifications for 3rd party apps
- Inbuild Bing maps and Bing search API exposed
- XNA and Sliverlight rendering engine is different
- OEMs will need to compliance to specific hardware requirements
- High level device driver programming is a part of software stack programmed and managed by Microsoft
- Market place validated the app and then issues a licensing to public the app on store
- In India the payment gateway for market place is not ready.
- Kinect gaming, 3D, NFC & more enterprise features in the upcoming version of WP7.

WP7 Overview Slideshare: http://slidesha.re/hP7Jsx

I would say that WP7 is a smartly controlled mobile platform and it’s totally committed to the consumers and want to give an unique experience by developing cool and innovative apps with the support of the developer community.

20th International WWW Conference

WWW Conference series provides the world with a premier forum about the development of the web. I had the privilege of being a part of this conference which brings together researchers, developers, users and vendor – all who are passionate about the web and what it has to offer, now and in the future. This time it was India which hosted the series in Hyderabad, a beautiful city know for its culture, technology growth and food. The 5 days conference was bifurcated into following tracks:

Keynotes: Dr.Abdul Kalam believes that the biggest hindrance in making the web truly democratic is the language barrier. Web has changed from 'What can I take' to 'What can I give'. web 3.0. Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of web wants every big company to convert all of it’s' data sets into semantic web formats and open it up with annotations. Advocating web apps for mobile rather than native apps.

Panels: “Connecting the next billion web users” panel summarized lets use TV_DVD and mobiles to get WWW into these rural areas and Web services must have voice embedding and internationalization for web accessibility.

Tutorials: “Web Retrieval” 270 millions web sites, 20 billion indexed pages, 1 billion users this tutorial had high queries to generate accurate, fast responses to search queries. “Linked Data” showed how it enables uniform access, parsing and interpretation of data and how novel wealth of structure data cab potentially be exploited for creating new applications. “Web of things” happened to be my favorite tutorial as it was addressing the concept of how web could be well accessed from embedded devices like TV, Mobiles, iPods, tablets and automotive entertainments systems.

Research Papers: World class Web researches presented their papers on Intent understanding, ranking, monetization, web security, social network algorithms, search systems. IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google research labs had their own stand at the exhibition hall and showcased effective demos based on their research finding. Speaking to each of them I am totally convinced that the web is getting better day by day. Check out my Presentation:

Its the perfect time for Mobile Web

View more presentations from Bhavya Siddappa.

W3C track: W3C organized two “camps” over 2 days: on accessible multilingual Web and on mobile web applications. I was invited to talk on industrial prospective as to why “It’s the perfect time for Mobile Web”. My talk covered; 10 reasons why it’s the perfect time for mobile web, current challenges in the Mobile Web and finally demoed HTML5 apps working well on all the mobile platforms and mobile browsers in online and offline mode. Later half there were some interesting discussion on the native vs mobile web, HTML5 road map & performance.

Key thing from the conference was that Mobile Web is the future and all have the right for accessing web. Let’s all work towards making web accessible to all through embedded devices taking away the barriers of language, religion, cast and creed.
View Pictures at https://picasaweb.google.com/bhavsidd/WWW

Celebration of the power of Womeness at Office

Pink, Green, Red, Purple, Orange colors all around… well the office looked very much like heaven, with the presence of the beautiful lovely ladies dressed up in ethnic wear “Saree”. It was all for the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day being celebrated at Teleca office on March 8, 2011.
The event kicked off with the inauguration of “Femme De Teleca” a networking forum for all the Teleca India Women’s. The main objective was to create a platform where women’s could share information, new ideas, and latest trends in business, fashion, lifestyle etc, a podium to express concerns, issues and suggestions.

But engineering business is basically a men’s world and Teleca India head Santosh Xavier begged to differ. He shared his thoughts on all his attempts to change this myth and encourage more women contribution in Teleca’s growth. Later followed a quiz making everyone recognize all women – past heroines, today's leaders and tomorrow's champions for what they have achieved and what is to come.

Women at times gets compliments for her beauty, looks, intelligence and always for here humbles and scarifies she makes, but this time it was awards given away to women’s for being well dressed, congenial, bold and gracious. Other set of awards were given to the ladies for exemplary performers at Teleca. Health, skin care and weight are major concerns for any women and thus a doctor was invited to talk on women related health issues and share key mantras to stay happy and gorges forever.

Later games, music, dance, song performance filled the atmosphere with lots of fun, joy and gave everyone a moment where she felt proud of being “A Women”. The message was “Bring in the difference, believe in yourself and the gift of being women!! Make everyday Women's Day. Do your bit to ensure that the future for girls is bright, equal, safe and rewarding.”

Experiment: iPad a learning tool to special kids

SAP Labs tied up with Spastics Society for a social cause, the cause was to spread computer education to the mentally challenged and to kids with learning disabilities.

It was an initative by the SAP to bring in some difference in the society by conducting various computer workshops. As iPad brought in the revolution in the education domain, they wanted to experiment in a workshop where the volunteers train the parents of these special gifted kids to use it as a tool for educating them.

iPad was introduced in the simplest form:
“It a device which has within it the Sound+CPU+Display+mouce+keyboard packaged into one slimmest electronic gadget”.

Proud of participating as a volunteer and all thanks to my iPad for making be eligible for getting into this workshop inspite of being a non-SAP employee.
We had the following apps for the workshop categories in the respective category:
Learning: Dot to Dot Number Whiz, ABC , Kids Match, FirstWords sampler
Communicate: TapToTalk , BDayBragbook, Photo Animals
Fun: Virtuoso Piano, Eensy Harp ,Talking Tom

I was there to educate the kids and their parents on and about iPad, but the fact is, in those 5 hours I learnt many lessons of life:

Parent’s said: Life is not the same for all. It takes time to realize the fact that God had blessed us with a special child and gain courage to give the best life to our kid. We are proud of them for whatever they do with their disabilities. Every day is full of challenges and life gets more exciting when we face them and see our kid making all things possible and breaking his own boundaries and surprises us with his achievements and learning’s.

A mother of a one such kid said “I cry every day but with the happiness that god choose me to be the mother of such a kid, because he knew I can make a difference. I thank my son for bringing in the purpose for my living.”

Teachers: We provide intervention services to kids with Cerebral Palsy, Autism, Mental Retardation, Multiple Disabilities and Learning Disabilities. Every kid is so different and highly talented. It’s a challenge to understand them but we grow everyday with them.

Kids: These lovely innocent kids couldn’t talk to me but yes they communicated with me via their hand movements, eye contact and hugs.
Mayank’s eyes said, “I want to learn more as much as I can. Can do everything like you’ll. I have less time and want to say hello to the whole world”
Vishnu’s hand said, “Thanks for being my friend, be with me forever”
Sonu’s voice said, “I am the dude and I know what I wish to have at the age of 21”
Smrithi’s hug said, “I loved learning and playing with the iPad, Thank you!”

These kids are so cute and innocent, “Living life as it comes, with no complaints to God, always smiling, bestowing faith on all and enjoying every movement without the fear of future”

"The best things in life are free; I realized that it is in giving that you receive. I realize that I have gained 10 times more than what I have contributed. "
View Pics at : http://bit.ly/hxBMnT